02 April 2010

Brits Slaughter the Postal Bicycle

So the Brits are ditching their bicycle postmen. Royal Mail is calling it "modernisation" and citing "safety" as the reason. Over a century of not only tradition but also role models for urban and rural mobility will soon be lost. It's just mad.

Does anyone know which company will be providing the vans to replace the bicycles? Was there lobby work at play? Wouldn't surprise me.

With a sigh of disgust I just figured I'd chuck a whole bunch of photos of postmen and women in Copenhagen doing what they've done for over a century.

And here's a spot of Cycle Chic on the left and a stamp celebrating Danish postal workers.

22 comments:

i asked a mail delivery person here in portland, oregon about whether she would be permitted to use a bicycle on the job. her current mode is to drive, park, put a big bag over her shoulder, and walk house to house until the bag was empty, then drive a few more blocks, park, and repeat.

"a bicycle? i have this bag to carry..." "well, your bike would carry it." "it would fall over." "well, with the right stand..." "it would get stolen, and it would be unsafe."

To be fair, the Dutch mail is moving in the same direction. Mailmen used to deliver both letters and small packages by bike, but nowadays even small packages, those that still fit the mailbox, are delivered by van. Something to do with physical exertion and not being allowed to carry heavy loads. Health and safety rules - the inverse of Muscles from Brussels.

Politicians ultimately are responsible for these decisions. Why would one think there is a thought process? In the U.S. the postal service is not a place to look for imagination. At least when the crunch really hits those in charge will be able to convert their fleets of vans to bicycles saving money and providing better health and welfare for the workers. What you want to bet it will be treated as a new revolutionary idea? It will only take 10 to 20 years to completely forget it had been done before.

Clever: If you see this postwoman again will you be armed with some educational materials?

Frits B: Ha ha, what this have to with "fair"?

From that linked article and also what Chas says the first question may be to ask "what in the hell is being snail mailed these days?"

The first thing to do to environmentalize cargo logistics is to reduce the amount of crap sent around. The internet was supposed to change that in relation to letters, but has it?

The second is to organize delivery efficiently, but in this case are job cuts creating the heavier loads necessary per delivery person? Whatever the reason, that 32kg limit is mentioned and so were electric-assisted bikes considered as a solution (also for longer distances and hills)? New EU regulations might even permit 500w motors (but then we have to worry about Mikael calling them "lazy letter carriers").

Were health issues taken into account? Many thousands of people now not riding their bikes every day? Or time waste since now these people might want to go to the gym if their ride to work is not so long....(As you can see in that linked article, they had already dangerized their delivery service with helmets and vests (or are these elective accessories?). So did people see the postal carries with helmets and vests and think "oh, that IS dangerous!".

Here are some images from Germany http://www.flickr.com/photos/67855182@N00/3047747888/, http://www.flickr.com/photos/67855182@N00/973412129/ and http://www.flickr.com/photos/sandrosamigos/2372641685/ and the Netherlands: http://www.flickr.com/photos/21275648@N05/2470997723/

Finally, what about the effects of things like on adultery http://www.copenhagenize.com/2008/08/how-to-promote-cycling-without.html

I have an even more cynical explanation. Royal Mail, like most organisations with a decent pension plan, has a huge pension deficit. Cycling ex-posties probably live longer than their van-based counterparts, even taking into account one or two of them getting knocked off their bikes. So some actuary somewhere has done the sums ... (Actually, I really hope this isn't true, because on the whole I like people and prefer not to be cynical about even senior managers but you do have to wonder sometimes)

@ Frits: I work in the mail in the Netherlands, and the delivery of packages and mail has been seperated for economical reasons. It has nothing to do with health and safety, mail on itself is often heavier than a package, sure letters are light, but if you have to carry fifty or so in your arms you definately develope muscles. :) Per neighbourhood you'd have maybe two or three packages at most, while every house gets a few letters.

So it's not the physical strain. It really is the splitting up of the sorting of the mail and the packages, it is cheaper to do this seperately, and it doesn't really make sense to first sort it, and then put it together again, transport it and then sort it all over again.

Almost all post is still delivered by bike, and there is no incentive to change this at all. In fact recently I got a new offer from the post to buy a new bike (they'd pay half of it, and the other half would be refundable).

The writer of that article in the Guardian is "Roy Mayall", a pseudonym for a postal worker who has been in the job for about five years and works in a delivery office somewhere in the south-east of England. He writes a blog at roymayall.wordpress.com

There was a petition on the No 10 website - in fact, I think I read about it here. Unfortunately, it's just closed (600-odd signatures), so there'd have to be another one - it's a shame the organisers of the petition didn't join up with a blogger like Roy Mayall (who has quite an influential readership) while it was still live.

Here in Finland the mail delivery company increases the use of electrically assisted bicycles. The news told today that nowadays one third of all the working bicycles are e-bikes. The elder postmen or -women are offered these bikes.

There is a belief that these e-bikes will replace also more and more cars in the future.

This I think is a much better alternative than replacing the bikes with cars. A car is a very clumsy vehicle when you have to stop (and find parking space!) and then turn on and off the engine every 100m.

The mail delivery company here also did big investments in electric cars in the early 90´s and set up a goal to replace 10% of all the cars with e-cars towards the millennium. The project was though ruined by the halt of the Elcat manufacturing company.

Here's an American designed cargo bike with the weight load transferred to the back in order to increase load capacity. This guy's trying to bring Dutch biking culture to the US but yah,a lot of people only think of bikes in term of recreation. http://www.madsencycles.com/

Kilometres cycled by Copenhageners so far today

Copenhagenize.com is the blog of Copenhagenize Design Company. Online since 2007 and highlighting the cycling life in Copenhagen and around the world.

40 years ago Copenhagen was just as car-clogged as anywhere else but now 41% of the population arriving at work or education do so on bicycles, from all over the Metro area. 55% of Copenhageners themselves use bicycles each day. They all use over 1000 km of bicycle lanes in Greater Copenhagen for their journeys. Copenhagenizing is possible anywhere.